12:1 Gallery

Detail of The 12:1 Gallery In 1987 Bob Findlay built the 12:1 scale Gallery in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art on the Perth Road in Dundee. The artwork which came to fill it is not an attempt to reflect acknowledged progressive Scottish painting at the time. There is no Steven Campbell, no Gwen Hardie or Alison Watt, no Stephen Conroy or Ken Currie. The gallery is very much a reflection of the life of the man it was made for, James Morrison. He commissioned it to give to his wife Dorothy and it is filled with the work of his contemporaries in the RSA, the RSW and the RGIFA; his friends in Scotland and beyond, his ex-students from Duncan of Jordanstone. In one sense it is a who’s who of James’s generation but there are works from many others in a wide-ranging and delightfully eclectic collection.

The artworks are all originals. And what is remarkable is how often they are clearly identifiable as quintessential works by their creators. There is a delightful Alberto Morrocco of a girl seated at a table with a watermelon and a bowl of fruit. It looks as if it came straight out of one of the artist’s Edinburgh Festival exhibitions of the late 1980s/ early 1990s. Likewise, there is a luminous David McClure still life and a Robin Phillipson back view of a female nude, a witty David Donaldson sketch of an artist in a landscape, a Will Mclean fishing boat and a whole suite of Barbara Balmer’s including a portrait and two charming still lives. All of these are unmistakeable and all of them reflect the sheer fun of making things on this scale and for this company.

There are a number of subjects personal to James. There is a portrait of him in an orange smock by the illustrator and Dundee colleague Ron Stenberg. Among many paintings by James in the gallery there is a portrait of the artist’s wife and a painter friend in Montrose painted a jewel-like landscape including Craigview, James’s home. A set of three tiny wood-engravings by the painter’s daughter-in-law Alyson MacNeill hang on the wall with more in the print rack that stands on the floor.

The 12:1 Gallery

The gallery was made just at the time James resigned from the art school. One of the projects he immediately undertook was to make a series of television programmes on contemporary Scottish artists. One of those featured was the printmaker Willie Rodger and there is a print by him. Former students are also represented with a sleeping female figure by Louise Johnstone and a monotone landscape by David Motion. Colleagues from Dundee are very well represented both from the painting school and further afield. There is work by the sculptor Gary Fisher, the jeweller Roger Morris, the printed textile designers Norma Starzakowna and Andy Taylor, the head of the college Myer Lacome and others. A work by Stan Clement-Smith, another Dundee colleague, arrived in its own wooden packing crate complete with stencilled label and ‘distress’ suffered in transit.

Not all the works in the gallery date from its inception and James’s wife Dorothy continued to add to the collection and to stage new exhibitions over the next 15 years. After leaving the College James started painting in the Canadian High Arctic. There is a small arctic painting of his hanging. The opportunity to work in the arctic in part developed from working in Saskatoon with the celebrated Canadian landscape painter David Alexander. David later visited Scotland and painted with James in Angus and Assynt. There is a work by him in the collection, as there is by the Parisian architect and long-time friend Emile Deschler. The latter work was gifted to Dorothy by Emile when he stayed at Craigview during an exhibition he held in Scotland at James’s instigation.

JOHN mORRISON